Hello Villan. I appreciate your enthusiasm and willingness to include us Canadians in the "diary" project. But, I'm a little skeptical about whether it would make sense for us - i.e., whether the benefits would be worth the effort.

If you were to do the research yourself to compile a master listing of Canadian gigs - that would be an overwhelming amount of work. And if you were to depend on Mudcatters to send you events to list, the results wouldn't be at all comprehensive, and thus not a particularly useful reference.

I see that the UK What's On thread is a lot more developed than the USA one, which makes sense to me; in a small country, people are more likely to think of the people in other cities as part of the same folk community and to contemplate traveling to the far end of the country to hear a good concert. In a big country, that's just not realistic.

For me in Toronto, for example, the folk scenes in Winnipeg or Vancouver or Halifax are just as remote for me as if they were in other countries. Even if somebody did take on the project of making a big list of Canadian gigs, I wouldn't be likely to go through it looking for something to do; I'd look at my local resources (e.g., websites of folk clubs) to see what's on locally.

In terms of Mudcat permathreads, I think a more practical option would be to have separate threads for provinces or cities. Or, rather than attempting to list individual concerts, create a list of ongoing things like sessions and song circles - this would be a more reasonably sized project because there aren't as many of them and they're not continually changing.

Another thing I'd suggest would be to ask the American Mudcatters how many of them are really using the US permathread to find events to go to. If it isn't useful for the Americans, it probably wouldn't be very useful for Canadians. My feeling is that the most effective way to use Mudcat to promote individual gigs is to start a regular thread for the gig with the date and place in the title.

Take care, Marion
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